Join us in celebrating the art and life of the American modernist Edward Fisk, who left New York City in September 1926 for a more peaceful life in Lexington and a teaching position at the University of Kentucky. In Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, Fisk was at the heart of the Bohemian art scene from about 1914 to the mid-1920s. Among his close friends were the avant-garde playwright Eugene O’Neill and his literary cadre, as well as the modernist artists Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Stuart Davis, with whom he exhibited.

This exhibition marks the generous donation by the Fisk family of forty paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings. Together with a 1998 gift of fifteen artworks by the artist’s children, it creates a significant archive of his art, representing a wide range of media and subject matter.

A skilled draughtsman, Fisk instructed his students in the beauty of Renaissance art, the soulfulness of Rembrandt, and the classical purity of Greek antiquity. Yet, his own work was influenced by a range of American and European modern art movements ranging from Post-Impressionism to the expressive realism of the American Ashcan school.

The artist’s stylistic choices seem determined by subject matter. Woman in a Red Hat demonstrates the expressive brushstrokes and closely cropped compositions of his portraits, a legacy of his studies with Robert Henri, whose work often featured the working classes and people of color. Landscape paintings from Vermont or drawings of the Italian countryside demonstrate his interest in the intersecting planes of Cubism and structuralism of Cezanne. After he moved to Lexington, Fisk had the time and resources to develop his skill in and knowledge of printmaking, from the graphic quality found in linocut prints of streets scenes to the finely modulated tones of mezzotint featuring a Cornish harbor he visited on sabbatical.

The Museum is indebted to the Fisk family, and in particular to the artist’s children, Allie Hendricks and the late Milton Fisk, along with their children, who have parted with a bit of their family legacy to ensure Edward Fisk’s artistic legacy

Susan Silas is a New York-based artist who uses photography, video, performance, and sculpture to examine the aging female body and various states of being. Her exhibition combines works from several series over the past twenty-five years, drawing connections between animal and human, stillness and motion, individuality and hybridity.

In EYES WIDE SHUT, 2010, from her ongoing series found birds, Silas photographs a dead Cooper’s hawk, which she found outdoors and documented as it decayed in her studio. She has written: “I was not aware when I began photographing these dead birds that my images were related to the work I had done on the Holocaust. Somehow these small embodied creatures had unwittingly become a substitute for those images I had seen as a child, images that I cannot remember ever not knowing about, of bodies stacked up like cordwood or being bulldozed into giant pits at liberated concentration camps.” In proximity to these meditations on mortality is a low-resolution video shot during Covid isolation with a thermal camera, in which Silas’s choreography is recorded due to the heat emanating from her body.

A large color photograph from her ongoing series love in the ruins; sex over 50 shows the artist and her husband, confidently naked in a horizontal embrace; while HYBRID, a 2021 sculpture in white bronze, shows the couple’s heads sutured together down the center between their eyes. Silas states: “It is a personal and speculative imagining of our avatar in a world in which our brains have been uploaded into the same data container. This is the shell in which we are reborn as a data set for eternity.” Their smoothly merged faces might also have something to offer in light of research on spouses who become more similar in appearance over time.

In addition to these works, we will present one of a recent series of sculptures titled natural history, which has Silas’s body conjoined with the remains of an opossum. They are the result of photogrammetry, where object/image information is translated into a software file that can be used for CNC milling by a high-precision robot or cast into bronze or glass from a 3D print

In 2022, the Museum received a generous gift of Barbara Rossi works from the Kohler Foundation in Wisconsin, and several of these are included in this exhibition. The artist is associated with the Chicago Imagists, along with Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Karl Wirsum, among others. They each utilize the human figure in fantastic ways, rendering it with precise line, vibrant color, and stylized distortions.

Bodily Forms shows Rossi taking playful liberties with the human body, indulging in fragments and flow. Swollen shapes—fingers, breasts, phalluses, and feet—are sorted and stacked, and they exude both aggressive and tender qualities. She is dedicated to process and has stated, “I would start in the middle of the page and make a drawing that was relatively small, and I gave myself the rule of not erasing anything or making any changes, and when I was satisfied with the form at the center, I would begin attaching something that was different from what was drawn first."

Rossi’s art is in the permanent collections of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Birmingham Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She studied at St. Xavier College and had planned to become a nun. Rossi eventually decided to pursue an art career and attended the graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The re:museum exhibition continues to evolve and re:fresh, with updated artworks and informational displays.

re:museum centers the Museum and our permanent collection by exhibiting a combination of artworks, educational prompts, and other incisive displays. The artworks on view in re:museum pull from our Digital Learning Gallery, including prints from Romare Bearden’s Odysseus Suite, a pair of handcrafted theatrical masks from Noh drama master Atsuyoshi Asano, and much more. Each item on view in re:museum includes contextual background information, contemplative prompts, and activities for a variety of ages and art experience levels.

In addition to the artwork on display, re:museum also features insights into our institutional history and a peek behind the curtain on how we exhibit and preserve works of art. What are different ways artwork can be framed? How do you catalog artwork in the collection? What was the Museum like when it first opened? Answers to these questions and more can be found throughout the exhibition.

The Digital Learning Gallery is accessible via our website. Find it on our homepage by scrolling to the button labeled “Digital Learning Gallery.” If you’d like to incorporate re:museum or the Digital Learning Gallery into your curriculum, please contact Education Coordinator Dan Solberg (dan.solberg@uky.edu).

Intentions – Actions – Outcomes mines the legacies of Fluxus and Conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s until today, as diverse artists question the nature of production, commodification, and reception; blur distinctions between disciplines of visual art, music, and dance; and use everyday objects and irreverent humor in sly and suggestive ways.

Artists include Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Janine Antoni, Lynda Benglis, Chris Burden, David Byrne, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Ayana Evans, Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Charles Goldman, Piero Manzoni, Dave McKenzie, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, Clifford Owens, Pope.L, Joe Sola, Stephen Vitiello, and Erwin Wurm, among others. Their works take the form of advertisements, diagrams, postcards, posters, scores, drawings, sculptures, and documentary photographs of private and public events.

Often the artist performs an act of endurance, testing the limits of their physical and mental capacities. These can be dramatic or subtle, as when Marina Abramović created Freeing the Voice in 1975 by screaming continuously for three hours until her voice was gone; or Janine Antoni using her eyelashes and Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara to make Butterfly Kisses in 2019, a drawing that is the result of thousands of accumulated winks against the paper.

Sometimes, the art offers the promise of an encounter, as in Dave McKenzie’s I’ll Be There, a 2007 multiple produced for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Public Offerings series. The artist distributed two hundred day planners, stamped with the time and location of where he’d be on a given date—on a train, at a museum, etc. He arrived at each rendezvous with the understanding that any one of his fellow citizens might be there to meet him but not knowing what would happen if they did.

Philip Corner’s installation Metal Meditations, 1972-77, includes calligraphic scores, which must be interpreted in order to “play” several suspended instruments and objects. As an artist/composer/musician, Corner is known for his cultivation of activities that result from chance-based operations and improvisation. Visitors to this exhibition will have the opportunity to activate his sculpture with some instruction and supervision.

Film screenings and planned and impromptu performances will be presented along with the objects on view. Extended wall labels will put works in historical context and address aspects of audacity and irreverence.

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ronald Feldman (1938 – 2023), whose gallery in New York City championed numerous performative and political artists including Eleanor Antin, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Leon Golub, and Hannah Wilke

Faisal Abdu’Allah is a British-born, Wisconsin-based artist and barber, and his exhibition features work that looks at the act of barbering and its relationship to Black identity. It includes photographs in a variety of formats, including tintypes showing the tools of the trade (electric clippers, attachments, and scissors), and images of Malcolm X in a series of screen prints engaging the history of the Black Power movement and issues of racial pride and empowerment.

In Hair Traits (2016-present), Abdu’Allah’s hair is used to create the tonal range in large portraits on birch plywood, featuring young men who look at the camera with varying degrees of confidence. He has said, “Essentially, my DNA is tied/inculcated in their image. Our hair carries a trace of who we are, and it is extremely political. In the history of post-colonialism, the straighter your hair was, the higher up on the chain of respect you were.”

In The Barber’s Chair (2017), the artist takes a utilitarian seat where the client sits to receive the barber’s skills and transforms it into a royal throne with the addition of tufted black leather and gold plating. This arguably recalls the bling associated with rap and hip-hop musicians. By elevating the status of the chair, he celebrates the Black barbershop and its role in the dissemination of knowledge about social and political histories.

In Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America, author Quincy T. Mills writes about the activist and organizer Kwame Ture (born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael): “It was in a Harlem barbershop, and not a school or church, where he learned of the Brown* decision and the Emmett Till lynching.”

In association with the exhibition, Abdu’Allah will discuss his work as one of this year’s speakers in the Robert C. May Photography Lecture Series and will provide one free haircut to a willing museum guest in a Kentucky version of his Live Salon performances (2006-present), during which he cuts hair and engages in conversation about selfhood and society.

*Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. The decision was a cornerstone of the civil rights movement and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all. \